Osaka
October 20-24, 2004
Earthquakes and Typhoons
During my three-week trip, Japan had two major earthquakes and two serious typhoons. When the first earthquake struck Tokyo, I was on a train leaving Shibuya and didn’t notice anything beyond the usual rattle. The first typhoon I watched safely from inside a shinkansen train going from Yokohama to Osaka. Fortunately my coworkers had advised me to leave early, because later trains were indeed stopped for several hours. My train had to slow to about 40km/h for a while, but arrived in Osaka safely and less than an hour late. The second earthquake killed over 70 people, but was in a remote area of Japan far away from me. That leaves the second typhoon: That one did force me to change my plans from a trip to rural Shikoku to an extended stay in the cities of Kyoto and Osaka, and still I got soaked while walking to a museum in Osaka. My rain coat is water-tight, but doesn’t protect the legs. And since I didn’t have time to go back to the hotel and change before the kabuki play, I sat through four hours of kabuki with wet jeans. The play (“野崎村”) was worth it, but the hot bath afterwards felt great!
Why so Warm in Osaka?
If the
house here seems a bit too well padded, that’s because it doesn’t really
belong to Osaka. It’s from Nagano, which has enough snow to host the winter
Olympics, and was transplanted to Osaka’s Open Air Museum of Old Japanese
Farm Houses. The museum is not very big, but its dozen different houses
show nicely how buildings were adapted to the different needs of different
parts of Japan.
Nanba Night Life
My hotel
is in Nanba, just south of the main night-life area of Osaka. I’m not really
a night-life person, but it’s fun to walk around and watch the crowds. Advertising
is so bright that I can take photos without flash, although it’s rather static
compared to the video screens of Shibuya. 
In
the midst of it all, a little shrine, visited by people on the way to or
from work.
A Mall Without Parking
Namba Parks
is a new mall in Osaka, eight floors high, over one hundred shops. But the
volume is nicely concealed by its terraced design and small gardens on each
level. The height only becomes obvious in an inner courtyard. In California
a mall of this size would require an ocean of parking and therefore would
likely be located in suburbia - here it’s smack in the middle of the city.
The solution: It sits right next to Nanba station, one of the two main transit
hubs in the city.